I am standing on a bustling street corner in Aleppo, Syria. At one side, a group of people chat; above, a young girl’s voice carries a song. Until a bang stops her melody dead. Smoke and chaos pour into the street – a barrel bomb has exploded metres away.
Suddenly, I’m in a refugee camp, next to children gathered around a fire. Bit by bit, more and more people and tents appear until they are everywhere. I feel incredibly anxious, hemmed in.
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(Image:Project Syria by Nonny de la Peña/Trauma: Built to Break at Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin)
Removing the VR goggles, the adrenaline continues to course through me. I have only been inside the immersive for a few minutes, but the effect is dramatic. It was commissioned for the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos to give politicians an insight into everyday life in Syria. And it works.
Built using gaming technology and audio from a real bomb blast in Aleppo on 6 November 2012, it made its point, says Eren Aksu of the Emblematic Group in Los Angeles, which produced the piece. Senator John McCain tried it; so did some politicians who had barely left their own state let alone visited Syria.
This is just one of a number of strikingly diverse installations at a new exhibition called Trauma: Built to Break, which opened at the Dublin Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, last week.
(Image: Science Gallery)
Not voyeuristic
This is no sensationalistic depiction of gore. It is a nuanced attempt to capture fresh insights and lessons from, and even some benefits of, trauma, says Shaun O’Boyle, lead researcher at the Science Gallery.
So where we could have been left peering voyeuristically, the show bravely dissects trauma, teasing out the visceral, the bloody, the taboo, and the hopeful and the inventive. It becomes beautiful, sad, disturbing, humorous, even, occasionally, fun.
Take the memory-laundering booth near the entrance. Write down a good and a bad memory from the previous week. Place the paper in a safety deposit box, return later and retrieve. The odd word or two may have been altered, and so the memory changed.
It’s that easy. This is a simple way of demonstrating cutting-edge research that has managed to alter, recode and replay memory in mice by at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Our brains change memories all the time, they are not reliable at all,” says Jessica Stanley, a Science Gallery researcher. Memory is not like replaying a DVD, but more like the patchy way we recall a play. This malleability means that even memories that cause post-traumatic stress disorder may be treatable.
Nearby is a work that engages with the universality of trauma in a creative and fantastical way: by London-based artist, Naama Schendar.
She morphs through multiple real-life people: a London fireman, an abused wife, an Israeli ex-combat soldier, a Palestinian mother from Gaza with a sick child. She lip-syncs to their real narratives, wearing such bizarre make-up and outfits that it negates the stereotypes of gender, age, race in the stories.
(Image: Your Beautiful Self by Naama Schendar/Trauma: Built to Break at Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin)
Form of release
Confronting trauma can help release us from some of its power says the exhibition’s co-curator Daniel Glaser, a neuroscientist and director of the Science Gallery, which opens at King’s College London next year. He says that seeing is far from a passive process, and that when you try to avoid looking at something, you are drawn to it.
“The not-seen has more power than the seen,” says Glaser. “Once you’ve looked at the trauma for a long time you can start to get beyond it.”
This seems to be true of many of the other installations. The Scarred for Life displays feature colourful, abstract prints taken from scarred body parts, juxtaposed with photographic portraits of the owners of the scars. Many are humorous, like the woman who looks mock-askance at her own arm stump, painted red.
The artist who created it, , says that he wanted to focus on how people heal and survive after a physical trauma. Of the hundred people he has worked with, 99 reported being a stronger person after their trauma.
The exhibition also explores societal trauma. A black and white photo of a drab, desolate council estate in Northern Ireland takes on a different meaning as you read the work’s title: Silence: After a Kneecapping.
Start a conversation
In contrast, in an army field hospital in Helmand province, Afghanistan, in 2007 are so visceral and dramatic: in the most graphic image, a gash runs the length of a soldier’s calf, and his foot is split open.
Yet the photographs use light and dark so skilfully that they resemble classical paintings. Cotterrell’s photos mark the first time permission was given to photograph British war casualties in surgery in Afghanistan.
(Image: Sightlines 1/Supernumerary’ by David Cotterrell/Trauma: Built to Break at Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin)
All the patients he contacted wanted the photos displayed because the images helped bridge a gap in their lives, he says. They could not describe to their loved ones why they were different after returning from war.
The Science Gallery wants Trauma to start a conversation: an innovative and thoughtful show, it will certainly do that and more by pressing emotional buttons while asking how we process trauma and emerge with something new.
Next year, Ireland marks the centenary of its Easter uprising, a pivotal event leading to the formation of the Republic. Young people don’t really understand or care much about the Irish conflicts, said my cab driver as we drove past the General Post Office building, the rebel headquarters for those eventful days in 1916.
Yet personal and collective trauma is never far away as we saw in Paris and Mali in the month the exhibition opened. Shows like this may help us explore the challenges head-on.
Dublin Science Gallery, Dublin, until 21 February 2016
Top image credit: Science Gallery
